Early 2000s server porn (uiuc.edu mail backend)

Saw this link posted over the weekend:

http://www.detritus.org/mike/gc/
And it reminded me of what things looked at back at the University of Illinois while I was there (2001-2005). I posted a good “war story” about this beast back several years ago:

http://www.intotheweeds.com/2007/03/into_the_weeds_circa_2002.html
But here are some pictures. Those are MTI 2300 and 8300 arrays. Each of those bays is only 4.5 – 9GB max, and the whole rack of 2300s was less than a TB. 60,000+ email accounts, pure sendmail frontends with special directory lookup plugins (for UIUC’s custom “ph” directory service), and that whole rack of Sun Solaris beasts to run POP and IMAP and unix home directory storage for the whole campus. Good times: